A Ban on Publication Fees?
Yesterday I was going through the “onboarding” process via Zoom with two new Editors at the Open Journal of Astrophysics (OJAp) when one of them mentioned a recent policy decision at the USA which means we’ll probably get even more papers submitted from there. I wasn’t aware of the decision, but there’s an article in the Times Higher about it here.
In a nutshell:
Under proposed rule changes published by the Office of Management and Budget, all journal publication costs – “including page charges, article processing charges (APCs), or similar fees such as open access fees for professional journal publications and other peer-reviewed publications” – will become “unallowable under federal awards”.
It is important to stress that at this stage the change is proposed rather than actual and it remains to be seen whether it will stand. I think it should because publication fees, article processing charges or whatever you call them are a complete waste of money.
The Times Higher article frames this as “Trump’s ban on paying open access fees”. I was worried to be finding myself in agreement with Donald Trump on anything, but I very much doubt that Trump himself knows anything about scientific publishing or has had much of a hand in this decision. It seems to me to be eminently sensible to ensure that funds meant to be directed at research are not frittered away on page charges. If I were involved in running a research institution I would make it a disciplinary offence to spend money on publication fees.
Of course the academic publishing industry is upset about the proposal claiming that scientific publishing is “high cost”, which it is but only because the publishers rake in huge profits. The way forward, as I have argued many times (e.g. here), is Diamond Open Access, a exemplified by OJAp. The marginal cost per paper article published for OJAp is just $10 and we have at least as much impact as the other leading journals in astrophysics.
I have been surprised how many researchers from the USA are already using OJAp, including many from top institutions such as Harvard, Caltech, Princeton and Chicago. The surprise is basically that authors from the USA have for many years been used to paying page charges for publishing in the Astrophysical Journal and others from the AAS stable. This was the case even before digital journals came on the scene and well before the Open Access movement. I suppose American authors put up with page charges because they felt they had to, but that is no longer the case.
Will we get even more submissions from the USA as a result of this policy change? We’ll just have to wait and see…
P.S. This morning I published the 600th paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
In the Dark 
July 21, 2026 at 8:00 pm
600th, brilliant!
Just view it as Trump agreeing with you rather than vice-versa.
July 21, 2026 at 8:10 pm
Yes, at the rate we’re going we’ll probably reach 1000 in the second half of next year (2027).
July 22, 2026 at 9:10 am
The trouble is, arXiv spawns 600 papers in about 10 days. OJA puts a valuable quality stamp on a tiny fraction of them. But somehow we still need to trawl through the remainder. There are too many papers being written, by at least a factor 10, and I don’t know how we solve this.
July 22, 2026 at 9:18 am
And that’s just astro-ph. in total, arXiv receives about 1,000 new submissions per day (not counting replacements). It’s out of control. People are too busy writing papers to do any actual science.
July 22, 2026 at 9:50 am
John,
Might it be possible to start with a smart but uninformed special-purpose AI model, train it only on the best advanced textbooks, then give it some examples of lousy papers and tell it why they are lousy, and after that ask it to write brief reports on – and assign quality ratings to – new papers?
But even then the underlying problem wouldn’t go away. Most papers are technically correct but useless. I suspect that the proportion of papers that are any good has declined since (say) 1900. It can hardly be denied that this proportion correlates inversely with the amount of government money going into research. One is reluctant to say that this amount should be reduced, but perhaps the highest priority should be to fund the large experiments necessary to get fresh data in fundamental physics – in particle physics and astrophysics. Physics is not mathematics or philosophy, and it is fresh data that best stimulates thought in our subject.
July 22, 2026 at 9:58 am
You say fund the large experiments, but many of those require input, or are based on, results from smaller experiments or theoretical work. The highest priority should be the best science, no matter whether its big or small. This could include research on archive data, for example.
July 22, 2026 at 9:55 am
I get all the astro arXiv alerts, not just the ones in specific areas, and I have noticed a massive increase in the daily numbers. Today was only 72 – a couple of weeks ago there was one day it was around 220, and for several days in a row was 100+ .
July 22, 2026 at 9:52 am
I recently refereed a paper from a US institution, and they did not appear to have either an institutional repository for papers or data. I noted that under UKRI funding rules (and I think the EU ones), results of research are meant to be open access and research data curated. I don’t know if NASA, NSF etc have similar rules.